[I was responsible for the "Story for All Ages" at this morning's services at my church. This is what I rough-drafted when the speaker asked me what I planned to say; the actual spoken-from-memory version was shorter, with some side riffs about shiny stickers and Nashville's library of awesomeness thrown in.]


This is a story about lots of stories. Over 150 stories, in fact. That's how many books have received Newbery and Caldecott Medals during the past eighty-some years. Each January, the medals are given to two of the best children's books published in the previous year.

A hundred years ago, it was a pain finding good books specifically for children. There weren't separate sections in bookstores or libraries just for kids' books. A lot of books that were being written for kids were gloomy or preachy or just plain boring, and then there were others that were majorly trashy, or they were poorly written.

This was a problem for guys like Fred Melcher. Fred owned a bookstore, and he wanted the good books to sell better. For books to sell, though, people have to hear about them.

Fred thought and thought and thought about how to get more attention for good books, and then he met with a group of librarians and said, hey, what if we give a prize each year to the book we think is the best, and then tell everyone we know about it? We can give the winner a medal, and host a fancy breakfast for them, and make it a really big deal so that newspapers and magazines will write about it. How does that sound?

And that's exactly what they did. They gave out the first Newbery Medal in 1922, and it was to Hendrik Willem van Loon, a historian dude who later joined All Souls Unitarian in New York. The 2006 Newbery Medal went to Lynne Rae Perkins, who's a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Grand Traverse, Michigan (for Criss Cross, which is a really nifty book!). Other books that have won Newberys include Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, which is about a Unitarian mathematician and sailor, and Invincible Louisa, about the author of Little Women.

After a while, Fred and the librarians realized that picture books weren't getting enough attention, so they created a second medal, and they named after Randolph Caldecott, a guy who had drawn lots of pictures for children during the Victorian age. Fred loved selling books so much that he later became editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly, a important magazine that recommends lots of books to people across the whole United States.

Fred was also very active with his UU church in New Jersey, including teaching RE and being president of the trust. He also participated in the American Unitarian Association: he was on their board and on several committees [and he helped Beacon Press, which publishes lots of UU books], and just before he died, he got the idea for one more award. He wanted good books on religion to get more attention, so he and his family gave money to the UUA to fund the Melcher Book Award. So now, every year, a good book on religion gets some extra readers, thanks to Fred Melcher and other UU volunteers.

[Postscript: the story went over well with some of the adults, but was way too boring for the kids. (DRAT!) Driving home, I came up with several ways I could have made it more interesting -- which won't go to waste, because there's a part of me that thinks Fred Melcher really deserves his own comic book, so someday... (You think I'm kidding? Jim Ottaviani's graphic novel about Niels Bohr is one of my favorite books...)]

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